Lutheran Sunset Home

One of the reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this category. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its impressive assessments in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for its long-term care score. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also was given an impressive short-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this category. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is considered to be a solid assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The last area we assessed is nursing. This facility received an impressive nursing score this year, with a B. Although this was not quite as impressive as several of its other category grades, this is nevertheless one of our more impressive scores in this category. In determining a nursing home's nursing score, we consider the amount of time nurses are seeing residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.